Advertisers of various products across diverse industries are constantly seeking to differentiate themselves and, in the process, find new and creative opportunities to present advertisements offers to consumers. Conversely, creators of intellectual property and other content (software, applications, websites, etc.) are constantly seeking for ways to monetize their assets, often through advertising associated with their content, and to attract more customers and end users. Furthermore, creators of desktop, mobile, tablet, and other software products often seek to identify the best way, time, and place to present potential customers with offers to download and install their software that reduces the number of steps and complexity to convert a user from viewing an advertisement to installing the advertised software.
Currently, various technologies and methods exist in the advertising and marketing industry to connect software makers with advertising partners and end users. For example, in order to promote their products and increase their user base, software makers may advertise their products by partnering with search engine publishers to improve the visibility for their product in search engine results by paying for links to their products (e.g., software applications) to appear as one of the top search results when potential customers search for certain key words using the search engine.
Software companies may also advertise their products on websites likely to have users interested in their software, such as technology websites. Some websites, commonly referred to as download portals, have large libraries of software offered to users for free and may present those users with offers to download other software while on the website or during the installation process of the free software. Software companies may promote their software products by offering their software as a free download on such portals, or by offering their software as one of the offers in conjunction with other software available through the portal.
While existing business models, such as those described above, provide software companies with a number of options for marketing their products to end users, they focus mainly on providing revenue to website publishers and advertising channels, but not necessarily to software makers themselves. Accordingly, a need exists for technology that addresses the need of software makers to monetize their software assets by creating new opportunities for software makers to present software product offers to end users, such as by utilizing existing, direct relationship with the end users through software already present on their computers or through interactions with end users as they explore software offerings.